This is part of our continuing series of accounts by readers of how they shed the illusions of liberalism and became race realists.

If the definition of a liberal is someone who has never been mugged, then to know my history is to understand my political journey.

I was a red-diaper-baby. That is, my father was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party USA. Years later, he came partly to his senses, but remained a liberal on all issues, including race. Predictably, my parents encouraged their children to go forth and enjoy the multi-racial joys of New York City. I even marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. when he made his famous speech, but his dream became our nightmare. Multi-racialism resulted in a private, and on some level deserved, holocaust for my family and me.

I am the eldest of five. One of my sisters, who was 13 at the time, was raped when she attended a party on our block. One of the blacks repeatedly asked her to go upstairs to see his apartment. After several rejections, he accused my sister of racism. As a well-indoctrinated, guilt-ridden liberal, she had no choice but to go with him. Out of fear and shame, my sister did not share her story with us until she landed in a mental ward a couple of years later.

Another sister was raped by a black open-enrollment “student” at City College in a locker room after she attended a co-ed swim class. The prosecuting attorney told my sister it was an open-and-shut case because she did everything she was supposed to do: She reported the event immediately, gave a detailed description of the accused (including a bizarrely shaped goatee), and then went directly to the hospital. However, after all the evidence was given, when the jury was polled, the whites voted to convict, but the tribe hung together and hung the jury.

Ironically, before her trial even began, another black tried to rape her in the elevator of her own building. He entered the elevator after her, and sent it down to the basement. There he cut her neck and was about to have his way with her, when someone luckily brought the elevator back up.

The following term, when my sister attended her first political science class, she found that the black who had raped her after the swim class was to be her classmate. She marched off to the administration office in a fury, where she loudly threatened to sue the school for its lack of security. They settled then and there by agreeing to pay for her to complete her education in Israel.

My mother’s wrist was broken when an African American relieved her of her pocketbook. I, myself, had a gun at my head twice on the streets of New York when blacks mugged me.

During the period of my family’s holocaust in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, I was starting my career as a teacher at George W. Wingate High School in Brooklyn. It had recently opened as the city’s first deliberately-integrated high school. At first, it offered a good education, but I was struck by the differences in the abilities, work ethic, and behavior of the races. I also noticed that the students segregated themselves in the cafeteria.

Integration can be defined as the period from when the first black moves in until the last white moves out. As the school began to tip in the expected direction, there was racial violence and several race riots. This festering condition culminated in the infamous Day of Knives. On the last day of the school year, as the students were going home, many blacks menaced their white classmates with knives, and warned them not to come back. The whites got the message and stayed away.

I served as dean of boys during the last of my eight years at that school. We averaged five arrests a day out of a student body of about 3,000. One of my duties was to convince fearful parents of victims to press charges. Every day a paddy wagon came from the local precinct to process the day’s catch. Sometimes we ran out of handcuffs.

There were junkies nodding out in the cafeteria, and the aroma of pot was everywhere. It seemed as if more students roamed the halls than attended class. Every six weeks or so, a teacher could be expected to be sent to the hospital. I remember one young handicapped woman who walked with a cane. Someone pushed her down the stairs, and she did not come back until the following year. After only a few days someone pushed her down the stairs again. She never came back.

I also recall the day a substitute cop was assigned to my office. At first, he put his feet up on the desk and expressed pleasure with such an easy assignment. By the end of the day he was complaining he was working harder than a desk sergeant.

One Senior Day started with water pistol battles, graduated to entire waste baskets full of water, and then fire extinguishers. The school had to be evacuated because the water was ankle deep. In one five month period, five of our students had either committed murder or had been murdered. One teacher who was assigned to the school left for lunch on his first day and never came back.

By the 1980s I had developed an interest in the race question. My family and former friends would call it an obsession. They typically dealt with The Problem by running away from it. To me, how liberal a person is on the topic is usually a function of his geographic distance from it.

I have always been interested in statistics, and my first exposure to racial stats came when I was watching a television program about the Bernie Goetz case. I was stunned when the announcer said blacks were ten times more likely to commit a violent crime than whites — stunned not by the number, but to learn that this information was available and being discussed. I sent for the transcript, and found myself compiling a collection of articles on crime. My next great discovery was Charles Murray’s Losing Ground. In 1992, I learned about Jared Taylor’s Paved with Good Intentions from the Bob Grant radio program. The rest, as they say, is history.

It has not been easy for me as a New York Jew, embracing the views that I do. I am regarded as a pariah when I express myself. Mostly by choice, I am estranged from my family. My comrades are my gentile wife and retired former colleagues who have shared my professional experiences and who have drawn similar conclusions from their observations.

If you have a story about how you became racially aware, we’d like to hear it. If it is well written and compelling, we will publish it. Use a pen name, stay under 1,200 words, and send it to us here.